LONDON, 26 July 2003 — As the world debates the worth of the United Nations, two contrasting but immensely powerful books (1. Never Learn To Type: A Woman at the United Nations by Margaret Joan Anstee, 2. We Did Nothing by Linda Polman, Translated by Rob Bland — both written by women with great fluency and elan could not have been more timely. They will be devoured by anyone seeking to understand the body which is one of the very few institutions able to temper the present gross globalization of greed and to control the desire of one member state for world domination. They serve at once to confound the enemies of the organization while moderating the expectations of those who see in it a panacea for the political follies of humankind.
Dame Margaret Anstee, author of Never Learn to Type, was the first woman to reach the rank of under-secretary-general. She was born to a humble family near Chelmsford, southern England. Anstee developed the steely will and discipline which enabled her to concentrate her formidable intellect on winning a First at Cambridge, then a job in the Foreign Office and, lastly, a brilliant career in the often murky, shark-infested waters of the UN. Anstee joined the UN in the worst of circumstances. She was in Manila in the first months of an unhappy marriage to a fellow British diplomat and took what she called ‘a general dogsbody’ job at a local UN office. She needed the money to pay for the fare back to England and freedom which the Foreign Office would not give her.
In London, she went in for the job of Labour Party international secretary. At the last minute, however, she accepted an offer from the UN. She started on a 41-year-long peripatetic career, much of it in Latin America. It finally brought her to the top of the organization through many occasions when she was taken not as the chief but the chief’s secretary. Her most taxing time came when she was dispatched to Angola with a tiny budget and an incompetent Nigerian general as assistant. The task was to try and bring peace between the government and the terrorist, Jonas Savimbi, who called her a whore and was supported by Washington and the white South Africans.
Hers is a fascinating account of the diplomatic absurdities and infighting which often surround the attempts of governments to agree on bringing order to the planet. When she headed the UN office in Vienna, the Iranian representative, unwilling to present credentials to a woman, wanted to give them to the man who was her chief of protocol. Anstee insisted that, though the man from Tehran need not shake hands with her and their hands did not have to touch, he had to proffer her his documents — no accreditation without presentation. He came to heel.
In We Did Nothing, Linda Polman, a brilliant Dutch journalist, writes with passion of the many botched UN peacekeeping operations and the shameful failure of the governments of the member states to support or finance them. The vividness of her account of genocide in Rwanda has never been bettered. She highlights the way Washington sends its troops in briefly on missions with ridiculous Madison Avenue names, withdraws them suddenly and leaves others to pay for the damage and bind up the wounds. Both authors rightly ridicule those who call for the UN to ‘reform’, cut its meager budgets and trim its operations while member governments refuse to pay their debts to the organization. It took the attack on the World Trade Centre to get the US to cough up $850 million of overdue contributions to the United Nations. Then Bush and Blair egregiously stabbed it in the back. The world is the poorer for Anglo-American treachery.
